Mass Casualty Disasters: A Survey.

A survey was sent to 101 emergency professionals at the federal, state and local governmental levels involved with planning for and responding to the consequences of mass casualty disasters with approximately 30,000 injuries. An excellent 84 response rate was obtained. Overall, most respondents believed that there is both a lack of resource capability and an insufficient ability to surge required resources to an area in time to meet requirements during a mass casualty disaster. More specifically, less than one-third of the statelocal respondents and approximately half of federal respondents believe that the combined federal, state, and local medical response resources will meet the needs of an estimated 30,000 injured. Only about one-third of federal and one-quarter of statelocal respondents believe there will be sufficient combined local, state, federal and private evacuation resources to meet requirements. Finally, almost three-quarters of statelocal respondents and one-third of federal respondents believe there will be insufficient local, state, federal and private definitive care resources to meet the definitive care requirement resulting from a mass casualty disaster with 30,000 injured.